I was on the road almost nonstop during November and December last year, shooting in exotic locations like Tobago, Barbados, and the South Pacific. I shot for Tobago tourism and several luxury villas, plus for my usual mix of travel/lifestyle stock. Along the way I saw tons of tourists and vacationers—well, hundreds at least—and what I realized as I watched them taking pictures was...

I consider the photographs I take of people to be environmental portraits, even though there are no elaborate props or backgrounds in the images. I suppose I define "environmental" as adding a context to the photograph, or suggesting a lifestyle, interests, or relationships.

And when I'm taking photographs of people, less is definitely more. A...

They’re people like me—professional photographers, and I see them at shows and workshops, drop in on their conversations on web forums, and exchange e-mail with them. Problem is, what they talk about, for the most part, is the business. And while the business is a real concern, it’s not what I want to talk about.

With a lot of my business coming from stock images, I travel at least six months of the year to take pictures related to travel, leisure, health, lifestyles, and business. Along with a lot of other stock and travel photographers, I've realized that the next frontiers for photographs are India and China. They are the emerging markets, and more and more photographs from those...

Call it instinct or intuition, but something is telling you what pictures you should be taking. I call it the quiet little voice, and when it talks, I try to listen. The problem is, as we move on in our careers, or our hobbies, other voices take over, and we often stop listening, or listening enough, to the guiding voice that comes from within.

Regular readers of this column know that Asia in general is a favorite place of mine. In fact, I cut my teeth in Asia: prior to being a travel and stock photographer, I was an editorial shooter, doing magazine stories and contributing images to books. I also did commercial, corporate, and annual report photography all over Asia.

Once in a while the idea for a column comes with a little help from my friends. This one did. A writer I know, viewing photos I'd taken on a recent trip to India, said, "You know, you really have a way of handling backgrounds. You should write about that in one of your columns."

If you travel and take pictures you know that photographs like the ones you see here don't just happen. At least, not for me. It's more likely that you'll be able to capture found moments that approximate some of these images, but since I most often set out to fulfill an assignment of one sort or another--stock shots for specific markets or a client's...

I'd been to the annual Pushkar Fair in Rajasthan, India, before, so I knew what to expect when I visited the event last November: thousands of people, camel trading and camel races, circuses, markets, bathing in the nearby sacred lake, and a week's worth of festival atmosphere. But I didn't go to capture the chaos and excitement, the color and activity. Rather, I...

When I started out, I was strictly a travel photographer, and naturally I tended to see and depict people according to the demands of the market. I'd often be in a place that was new and different, and I'd be seeing people whose lifestyles and culture were different, even exotic, and it was my job to bring to the market images that reflected and revealed those...